Will Pritzker Be Pivotal for China?

By Lara Day and Josh Chin

China has no shortage of modern architectural icons, from the Guangzhou Opera House to Beijing’s National Stadium. But most of them have been spearheaded by foreign “starchitects” enabled by government funding—take Iraq’s Zaha Hadid, Switzerland’s Herzog & De Meuron and the Netherlands’ Rem Koolhaas, to name a few.

Now, Chinese architecture may have reached a turning point, with the announcement on Monday of the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Award winner: architect Wang Shu, the first China national to receive the prestigious award. The official awards ceremony will take place May 25, when it will be held for the first time in Beijing—a location decided in October, long before the winner was known.

The prize, founded in Chicago in 1979 by the Pritzker family, which is synonymous with the Hyatt Hotel Group, is often likened to architecture’s Nobel, the Scandinavian award that the Pritzker was modeled after. Pritzker winners receive a $100,000 grant.

“The fact that an architect from China has been selected by the jury represents a significant step in acknowledging the role that China will play in the development of architectural ideals,” said Thomas J. Pritzker, head of the Hyatt Foundation, in announcing the prize. “In addition, over the coming decades China’s success at urbanization will be important to China and to the world. This urbanization, like urbanization around the world, needs to be in harmony with local needs and culture.”

“All of a sudden Wang Shu is proving that we can produce quality work ourselves,” said Zhu Tao, a University of Hong Kong architecture critic and historian who was born in Shandong province and has practiced as an architect in cities across China.

“China makes up a fifth of the world’s population, but many Chinese architects don’t have confidence in their work,” said Mr. Zhu. For young architects working in the context of explosive urban growth, he added, the prize “sends a message that architecture is a cultural enterprise, not just a commercial enterprise, and that architects are creators of culture. That’s very meaningful.”

The remaking of China’s urban landscape by outsiders has led to hand-wringing in both the Western and Chinese press over Chinese architects’ lack of visibility. Against that background, Wang Wei (no relation to the architect), a professor of architecture at Southwest Jiaotong University, confessed she was surprised by Wang Shu’s Pritzker triumph.

“I say ‘surprised’ because I thought it would take many more years for a Chinese architect to win this award,” Ms. Wang said. “Considering that the study of architecture didn’t really begin to develop in China until after 1980s, it’s on the fast side.”

The 48-year-old Mr. Wang, who was born in Urumqi, in the western Chinese province Xinjiang, is a relatively youthful Pritzker laureate, Ms. Wang added. By contrast, I.M. Pei—who was born in Guangzhou in 1917, before the People’s Republic of China was established, and who was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in the mid-1950s and spent most of his career there—won the award in his 60s.

At his Hangzhou-based firm, Amateur Architecture Studio, established in 1997 with his wife, Lu Wenyu, Mr. Wang strives to develop a new language for Chinese architecture, fusing modernist forms with salvaged materials that draw from China’s culture and history. His Ningbo Contemporary Art Museum, for instance, reconstructs a former port building, while his Xingshan Campus for Hangzhou’s China Academy of Art is roofed with two million tiles collected from traditional houses.

“Up until now the perception has been that most of the design-led architecture has been from foreign firms, while Chinese firms have been viewed as delivering their projects,” said John Puttick, lead architect for the Beijing studio of Make Architects, a U.K.-based practice. “The prize underlines the work of emerging architects in China and the quality of the work they’re doing.”

Foreign architectural firms, meanwhile, tend to approach China as a tabula rasa—or, in the words of Ms. Hadid, a Pritzker laureate and one of the nine jurors for the 2012 prize, a “perfect blank canvas” for architects.

“Wang Shu has been pursuing a direction in which he basically doesn’t pay too much attention to trends, especially those originating from the West,” said Hong Kong Chinese architect Rocco Yim, whose firm, Rocco Design Architects, has multiple projects across China. “I think that is a good lesson for young architects in China in general.”

The award may also help China dispel widely repeated criticism, including from within the country itself, that it can’t compete with other countries in creative disciplines.

People born in mainland China have won six Nobel Prizes, all but two of which were for physics. (The other two were the 2010 Peace Prize, awarded to dissident Liu Xiaobo, and the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded to Gao Xingjiang largely on the strength of “Soul Mountain,” a novel published in Taiwan in 1989 after Mr. Gao had already emigrated to France.) China-born composer Zhou Long won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his opera “Madame White Snake” last year, but has spent most of his career in the U.S., having become a U.S. citizen in 1999.

“China has always been known much more for building than for creating, and this proves that China has made progress in culture and creativity,” Ms. Wang said. “It’s a positive for every industry in the country.”

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